Mission idea: Last Stand / Survive as long as you can
I would absolutely love a mission type that is basically an endless last stand.
One of my favorite parts of Helldivers 2 is when a normal 40 minute mission goes completely off the rails. You finish the objective, reach extraction, call the Pelican and suddenly the entire map seems to come down on you.
Enemies from every direction. Stratagems constantly going out. Reinforcements dropping everywhere. Everyone firing at anything that moves while the extraction timer slowly ticks down.
Sometimes those two minutes are absolute chaos.
And sometimes you stand there wondering where the enemies are.
The current defense mission where you wait for the ships to evacuate scratches a similar itch, but not quite. The enemies come in scripted waves, mostly from predictable directions, and once the team knows where to set up it can become pretty easy to control.
What I want is the opposite.
Give us a position and tell us:
Hold it for as long as you can.
No fixed number of waves. No eight ships and then you are done. No safe direction.
Enemies should be able to attack from all sides like they do during normal extraction. The longer you survive, the worse it gets.
At first it might be normal patrols and breaches/drop ships.
Then more heavies start appearing.
Then multiple breaches at once.
Then the game basically starts asking, "Okay, but how many Factory Striders can four Helldivers actually deal with?"
Let the difficulty keep escalating until the squad is eventually overwhelmed.
Maybe every few minutes you reach another reward tier, so surviving 5, 10, 15, 20+ minutes gives increasingly better rewards. You could even have an emergency extraction available at certain intervals, giving the squad the choice between getting out with what they earned or staying and gambling everything on another few minutes.
I don't even care if the game eventually becomes completely unfair.
It should.
The entire point would be that you are not expected to win forever.
You are four Helldivers, surrounded, running out of ammunition, calling down everything Super Earth has left while the enemy keeps coming.
I want the kind of mission where after 20 minutes there is fire everywhere, half the defensive position is gone, someone is screaming that their 500kg is still on cooldown and the squad collectively realizes:
"Oh. We're not getting out of this one."
That is the Helldivers 2 experience I want more of.